


Spoils of War

by Mickleditch



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T. E. Lawrence
Genre: Developing Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, RPS - Freeform, Vignette, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:08:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29083650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mickleditch/pseuds/Mickleditch
Summary: "Somewhere there is a thief who loots treasure buried in the desert," I said. "Imagine his dismay if he were to dig up what I will bury."
Relationships: Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi/T. E. Lawrence
Comments: 7
Kudos: 4





	Spoils of War

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't know anything about them and this is all lies.

"Why do you take such terrible risks?" Feisal asked me, one evening. 

The inner curtain of his living tent was down - indicating, as it did, that he was reading, or writing one of countless letters, or engaged in private business - and we were hidden away from outside demands for a short while. I would tactfully disappear when he first held audience with the tribal sheiks, out of concern for the effect that the presence of a foreigner and a Christian might have on their shaky allegiance, but otherwise I lived with him most of the time, for I was inclined these days to think of myself as being of his household instead of an attache. Perhaps it was because I wanted it to be that way so much.

So Feisal had the right to ask questions like this when even Allenby did not. Though Allenby was my master in Arabia, I had never obeyed appointed masters any further than was practically necessary, while Feisal, conversely - perversely - I had a growing and very earnest desire to please even as I guided him. Once the intention had been that I should coax and steer the Arabs into achieving ends that were more ours than theirs, and lately this had been all, for my part, of much less importance, and I wanted keenly to see him dominate the arena, silence the voices of those with whom he disagreed, and use me too, as he chose.

I had been given the freedom of the desert in which to write my own rules, and still there were moments when I wanted more than anything for Feisal to be my master.

When he talked of risk now, he was not referring to my semi-delirious jaunt through Wadi Ais, or the fever and dysentery that had laid me up with neither strength nor the desire to rebuild it with food, but with my sense of fear oddly inverted and my power of thought sharpened. Sickness was a hardship he calmly accepted. He was as fine and true as the decisive sword of his name, but, like the sword, he would regularly push through to snapping point, and I had heard how too little rest and too thin a spreading of himself had more than once caused him to be carried off the battle field fainted, by the men he had been leading only minutes before. His horror was that which was shared by the Bedouin; although they would face down any bullet, they had a dread of being ripped into a hundred pieces by an explosive. This made the Garland-trained dynamiters all the more remarkable, and myself, who would grope for a hair-trigger igniter in the pitch dark, or chuck it all in to make as big a bang as possible, suddenly very aware of my own tenuous grip on this mortal coil, and all that I would leave behind if I lost it.

"Would a risk-averse man have gone out into the shellfire at Medina?" I said, although it was at Medina that Feisal's nerve had wavered, when his own tent had almost suffered a direct hit. "And ridden his horse up and down, just to rally the men and show them that they had nothing to fear?"

"Ali of the Harith has been telling you tales," he said, with the faintest of smiles.

"But I know that they are true."

Feisal dropped his shoulders. "All men are brave, when they must be so or lose everything that they have been fighting for. Fighting for oneself is the easiest. Every man will do that. Fighting for that which you love is harder, though still easy. Fighting for that which is right, though you may not love it, is the hardest. And then there are many degrees between, the measure of how much and what it may cost you to fight, and that is the risk factor. So the risk is enormous, to personally reward you so little, and to cost you as much as it might."

There was no timidity in him. Every fine line of his form echoed past generations of those noble Arabian warriors about whom so much has been written, and though his eyes were eternally thoughtful and invariably kind, they could flash at times, and one would see the fire of his ancestors. Feisal was a diplomat, ill-fitted to the role of a soldier, but he was determined to act as one for as long as his countrymen needed him, and I wondered if that made him braver than if he had been born to the part. And I - I was a pretender, full of monstrous performances and half-baked dreams; clever and useful enough, but unable to turn the cloud-castles I had built in boyhood into stones and mortar, without there being other, more capable men in the world.

"Perhaps," I said, "I like to think of how I have pushed myself to my limits, confronted my frailities and my fears - and once again claimed a victory over them."

Feisal remained quiet for some time. Then he said, "I knew a man once in Damascus, who would practice tortures upon himself. The most cruel things. When I asked him why, he told me that he wished to do it before the Turks took him prisoner and inflicted the same. 'But the Turks may never take you,' I said to him, and he answered that it would come in the end, and so he preferred to be the orchestrator of his suffering. For if he had control over his own body, he could control the world."

I was terribly in love with him then, and at all other times as well, because he was one of the few people who had ever come close to understanding my mind when I barely understood it myself. 

"You may find it hard to believe me," I said, "but I hate to be harmed in any way. I loathe pain; It sends me half-mad. And the worst thing of all is not hurting myself, but having someone hurt me. Having all my walls breached and it done to me, without my readiness - that is what's intolerable."

"Wound shock," Feisal said, softly. "The cutting away, as with the sword, of our defenses."

"Yes. And, yet - "

"Yet?"

"I have a fear that if a strong man were to put his hands on me, I would let him do anything to me that he wanted to do. No matter how much it hurt."

Feisal watched me for a little time. Then he stubbed out the butt of his cigarette, drew close on the magnificent old Turkish carpet on which he received his friends and relations, and kissed me; first on the forehead, as he was wont to do - he being willowy, and a full head above me, when standing - and then at the corner of the mouth. He lingered there for a moment, and I was filled with both the exquisite ache of my longing for him, and a dread that was borne less of what he might ask of me, than of what my own body might acquiesce to. Outside, the sky was bright and the sun hot, but it was as though the warmth was only mine to perceive from a distance, making me wonder if it was this, the eternal and self-inflicted estrangement from the flesh, that was my truest agony.

"I would be good to you," he said, "if you permitted it. And for you, and with you."

"Any other man would simply take his spoils of war. You have been fighting gallantly for long enough."

"Spoils," he murmured, with irony. "You are like no-one in all of Arabia. Or, I think, in the world." 

How miraculous it was, I thought, that the two of us, each made so solitary by necessity, had been able to comfort each other, and equally miraculous that Feisal already knew too much about me, and still saw me as a thing deserving and holding the potential of love. 

"Somewhere there is a thief who loots treasure buried in the desert," I said. "Imagine his dismay if he were to dig up what I will bury. It will be the tomb of the royal mistress." And I giggled a little at that, because it suddenly seemed very funny coming from my lips, as it had been obscene from Vickery's, and he too laughed quietly, perhaps sharing the joke (he was possessed of a sometimes freakish humour) or perhaps in amusement at me. He kissed me again, then fell to silence, folding me against him.

I had changed more than I knew in these past months, and the locks of the carefully-crafted prison where I had incarcerated my most base nature as a youth were starting to slowly and progressively weaken, eroded by the sand, laid seige to by a man from whom I could not have been further apart in daily habit, recollection of the past, or expectation of the future. He knew enough about the British to know that we might yet betray his dreams, but he did not speak of this to me. That was my good fortune, but it did not allay my feelings for him, or my abiding sense of guilt.

**Author's Note:**

> Major Charles Vickery, who was severely homophobic and disliked Lawrence intensely, later claimed that it was 'common knowledge' that Lawrence was a 'royal mistress' and that was why he was never spoken of in Arabia. He also claimed a bit of gossip about Feisal that didn't even have anything to do with Lawrence, so make of that what you will.


End file.
